Wind and fire engineering lab facilities

First-class facilities and equipment in our lab allows us to test from very small-scale materials (mechanical and thermal property tests) to full-scale structural fire and wind testing of roof, wall and floor panels.

Testing materials with our equipment helps our researchers and industry partners to develop an improved understanding of the performance of building materials and many important building components such as light gauge steel (LSF) roof panels and LSF wall and floor assemblies under simulated fire conditions (both ambient and elevated temperatures) and wind conditions

Material tests

We can test the mechanical and thermal properties of materials at room and elevated temperatures:

a scientific and industrial lab for heavy mechanical and structural testing, including fire and wind testing capabilities and many universal testing machines

a 5t gantry crane and 2.5t forklift for heavy lifting

100m2 of strong floor (up to 500 kN)

Bending test set up

Finite element modelling (computer modelling)

All laboratory tests can be simulated using our high performance computing (HPC) facilities. We can achieve them using structural, thermal and coupled thermal and structural finite element models developed using finite element software including Abaqus CAE, MSC Patran, Ansys and SAFIR. More than 40 PhD and Masters research projects have been completed that fully utilized QUT’s HPC facilities to achieve excellent results through simulations.